So much agreement with this slide deck, particularly the list of limitations of current FaaS:
15 min lifetimes; I/O bottlenecks; no inbound network comms; no specialized hardware; and the general horribleness of using DynamoDB or S3 state as a platform for distributed computing protocols.

my quick index of all re:Invent sessions. Please wait for a few days and I'll keep running the tool to fill in the index. It usually takes Amazon a few weeks to fully upload all the videos and slideshares.

Pretty definitive, full text descriptions of all sessions (and there are an awful lot of 'em).

They avoid schema changes and breaking changes using an approach they call "non-breaking expansions" -- expose new version in a service interface; support multiple versions in the consumer. Example from slides 50-63, based around a database schema migration.

Good basic pres from John Allspaw, covering the basics of tier-one tech incident response -- defining the 5 severity levels; root cause analysis techniques (to Five-Whys or not); and the importance of service metrics

a new networked pub/sub library from Martin "Disruptor" Thompson, based around a replicated, persistent log of messages, with exceptionally low latency. Apache-licensed. Very similar to the realtime messaging stack we've built in Swrve. ;)

Nice deck covering HyperLogLog and its origins, plus a slide at the end covering the Flajolet/Wegman Adaptive Sampling algorithm ("how do you count the number of elements which appear only once in stream using constant size memory?")

a Presentation from Simon Willnauer on optimization work performed on Lucene in 2011. The most interesting stuff here is the work done to replace an O(n^2) FuzzyQuery fuzzy-match algorithm with a FSM trie is extremely cool -- benchmarked at 214 times faster!

mostly a DynamoDB puff-piece from last week's Amazon Cloud Connect, but contains some good real-world figures for a 20-billion-GUID deduping table use-case at end. ($4,150 per month, to cut to the chase)

This talk explores when to start performance testing, how to avoid the common pitfalls, how to profile when the results cause your team to pull a funny face, and what you can do about that funny face. Specific issues to Java and managed runtimes in general will be explored, but if other languages are your poison, don't be put off as much of the content can be applied to any development.

Storm-based service to detect malicious DNS domain usage from streaming pcap data in near-real-time. Uses string features in the DNS domain, along with randomness metrics using Markov analysis, combined with a Random Forest classifier, to achieve 98% precision at 10,000 matches/sec

Michael Barker and Martin Thompson's talk at the last QCon on the LMAX Disruptor, and other nifty lock-free techniques and patterns. 'Martin Thompson and Michael Barker explain how Intel x86_64 processors and their memory model work, along with low-level techniques that help creating lock-free software.'